Independent Thinking in a Red-Blue Town

The Washington Post reports that Jack B. Johnson, county executive of Prince George's County in Washington's Maryland suburbs, is very generous to his friends. Since he took office,
...15 of his friends and political supporters have been awarded 51 county contracts totaling nearly $3.3 million, according to records and interviews.
In several ...

A headline over a Washington Post editorial reads:
Hands Off Hedge Funds
Sometimes libertarians deserve to win an argument.
Gee, thanks. I'm glad libertarian arguments against over-regulation made sense to the editorial writer in this case. But I'm disappointed in the suggestion that this is a rare occasion.
Indeed, I'll bet the editorial writer ...

Late last month, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce began broadcasting television ads that extolled several Republican lawmakers for supporting the new Medicare prescription drug program. The spots were part of the chamber's $10 million midterm advertising and voter mobilization budget.

Even if the Medicare expansion were popular -- which is not at all clear -- the Chamber of Commerce's ads would just encourage voters to increasingly expect transfers and handouts from Washington. If the Chamber of Commerce praises Republicans for expanding entitlements by a trillion dollars over the next decade, then it's just contributing to an environment in which spending and deficits and unfunded liabilities continue to soar. Surely the Chamber could find something good the Republicans have done to highlight in its ads.
Couldn't it?

Gee, thanks. I'm glad libertarian arguments against over-regulation made sense to the editorial writer in this case. But I'm disappointed in the suggestion that this is a rare occasion.
Indeed, I'll bet the editorial writer agrees with most of the basic ideas that libertarians advocate: private property, markets, the rule of law, limited constitutional government, religious toleration, equality under the law, a society based on merit and contract not status, free speech, free trade, individual rights, peace.
In the West we live in a liberal world, and in the United States we call liberalism "libertarianism." (When Americans say "liberalism," they mean the welfare state.) The Post's disagreements with libertarianism are really less rare than the headline suggests; they involve how often and how much national policy should deviate from the basic principles we already agree on.
Cross-posted from Comment is free.

The Washington Post reports that Jack B. Johnson, county executive of Prince George's County in Washington's Maryland suburbs, is very generous to his friends. Since he took office,

...15 of his friends and political supporters have been awarded 51 county contracts totaling nearly $3.3 million, according to records and interviews.
In several cases, Johnson awarded county contracts to supporters after he failed to persuade the County Council or others to place them in county jobs. He has also created at least a dozen high-profile positions and filled them with supporters, including fraternity brothers. Some of those who received contracts or jobs had no expertise in the field, and others did not produce written reports required by the county.
In one case, Johnson hired a friend's company, which produces a local cable show, to write a report on school construction financing and then gave him two more contracts to evaluate economic trends. He gave a similar contract to his campaign chairman.

Perhaps the surprise is that this is considered front-page news. What politicians don't hand out tax-funded benefits to their friends? Certainly the various scandals swirling around the Republican Congress -- involving Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, and others -- provide fresh reminders.
As I wrote in Libertarianism: A Primer, one of the earliest and most charming descriptions of political reality came from Lord Bolingbroke, an English Tory leader in the early 18th century. He wrote to a friend:

I am afraid that we came to Court in the same dispositions as all parties have done; that the principal spring of our actions was to have the government of the state in our hands; that our principal views were the conservation of this power, great employments to ourselves, and great opportunities of rewarding those who had helped to raise us and of hurting those who stood in opposition to us.

Jack Johnson should tell the Post, "Yeah, what he said!" But Johnson doesn't have to reach back to Lord Bolingbroke for a precedent. In the same part of Libertarianism: A Primer, I told the story of Johnson's predecessor as Prince George's County Executive:

A particularly striking illustration of what we might call Bolingbroke's Law is the record of Maryland governor Parris Glendening. Elected in 1994, Glendening seemed a clean, honest, moderate, technocratic former professor. He might give Maryland big government, but at least it would be clean government. So what did he do when he took office? Well, here's how the Washington Post described his first budget:

In his first major act as Maryland governor, Parris N. Glendening unveiled a no-new-taxes budget that unabashedly steers the biggest share of spending to the three areas that voted most strongly for him: Montgomery and Prince George's counties and Baltimore.

Lord Bolingbroke, call your office. A few days later, it turned out that Glendening and his top aide were collecting tens of thousands of dollars in early pension payments from Prince George's County, where Glendening served as County Executive until his election as governor, thanks to Glendening's creative interpretations of rules that gave early pension benefits to government employees who suffered "involuntary separation" from their jobs. Glendening decided that officials not allowed to seek reelection because of term limits, such as the two-term limit on the County Executive, had been "involuntarily separated" from their jobs. And he "demanded" the resignations of his top aides a month before he left his county job--making them also victims of "involuntary separation"--whereupon he hired them as his top aides in the governor's mansion.
Like the Energizer bunny, the Glendening money train just kept on going. In May the governor asked the legislature to spend $1.5 million in taxpayer funds to rescue a struggling high-tech firm in Prince George's County headed by one of his political supporters. Then in August, Frank W. Stegman, the state secretary of labor, licensing, and regulation, hired the wife of Theodore J. Knapp, the state personnel secretary and a colleague of Stegman's from the Prince George's government, for a job in his agency. No ingrate, personnel secretary Knapp then returned the favor by recommending a $10,000 raise in Stegman's meager $100,542 salary.

Politicians reward their friends. What else is new? The best way to limit the damage from this sort of corruption is to limit government to a few specific functions and leave most important services in the marketplace.

A Washington Postfeature says that Connecticut Senate challenger Ned Lamont's website shows him to be "a fiscal conservative, a social liberal and a foreign-policy moderate." (The Post also refers to Lamont's 150-word statements on the issues as "elaborate position papers," which seems to reflect low expectations for political discourse.) Since I expressed doubt a couple of days ago about the existence of fiscally conservative Democrats, I was intrigued.
So what does the website show? Lamont is indeed socially liberal, for better (opposition to gay marriage bans, creationism, the Terri Schiavo intervention, stem cell restrictions, and other schemes to impose conservative moral values on other people) and worse (support for hate crimes laws, affirmative action, and other schemes to impose his moral values on other people).
But "fiscal conservative"? Let's go to the tape. On his website he promises to spend more money on national health insurance, universal preschool, all-day schools, "an overarching plan for clean energy and energy independence," and "a serious, long-range infrastructure plan to upgrade our schools, public transportation, highways, our sewage treatment, and our levees in below sea-level areas [and] a transportation strategy which interconnects cities and suburbs, inner cities and jobs and affordable housing, and ports and airports." Sounds expensive.
(As a good big-government liberal, he's also opposed to school choice, private Social Security accounts, and free trade. But our subject today is taxes and spending.)
Virtually all the references to "budget" on Lamont's site are boasts of how he increased various budgets as a city councilman. He has declared his opposition to earmarks, but of course earmarks -- while notorious -- are only a tiny part of the federal budget. Nowhere does he promise a balanced budget. He does promise to roll back Bush's tax cuts -- that is, to raise taxes -- but that would hardly be sufficient to close the current deficit and pay for his sweeping spending plans, even if higher marginal tax rates did not reduce work, investment, and tax revenue.
Alas, the search for a fiscally conservative Democrat continues.

Reading major newspapers and listening to NPR this morning, I don't hear anyone asking what seem to me to be the obvious questions about Castro's condition: Is Castro alive? Is he incapacitated? Did he compose or approve the statement read in his name? In a secretive dictatorship, you can't believe everything the regime says. Raul Castro and his colleagues may be trying to create the impression of a gradual transition. On the other hand, it could well be the case that Fidel is himself trying to prepare Cubans for a transition that will happen eventually. I'm just surprised that no one seems to be asking whether Fidel directed this cession of power himself -- except in the streets of Miami.